Barry Tompkins: When things go awry, blame it on the house

I'm not quite certain what it is, but anyone or anything that enters the portals of our house immediately becomes neurotic. I'm not talking "wearing Kleenex boxes on your feet instead of shoes" neurotic. Just quirky.

Frankly, I blame it on the house. Our house is tiny but thinks it's big. Oddly enough, my wife and I are very much the same way. Our son, on the other hand, grew bigger than the house. Our house is 1,800 square feet, and our son is 1,875. He finally moved into his own apartment with nice high ceilings and big doors. He had banged his noggin on the hood atop our stove so many times he had the word Thermador permanently imbedded in his forehead. He had to move out before somebody sold him as a refrigerator.

I think our house liked the previous owners better. It's done everything it can to drive us out and get somebody in here who doesn't spill bacon grease on its floors and who doesn't care if its lights don't work. We're funny that way — and maybe everybody has this problem, but reading and requiring a miner's helmet to do so is not the ticket to being on the foldout page of Architectural Digest.

Our house is, in every way, a Marin County house. It somehow even turned our son's boa constrictor into a vegan. It was the only carnivorous reptile in America that had a mouse as a pet.

Recently our house rose up and all but said it had had enough with any sort of appliance. First, it was the dishwasher that suddenly decided it was way above being used as a device for making dishes, pans and the odd spatula gleam brightly and would be better served as, say, a hair dryer, knowing full well that sticking our heads in the dishwasher would make us look rather foolish in the eyes of both the boa constrictor and the dog.

Then the drier quit. Perhaps because we didn't know what else to do with the dirty dishes, but I prefer to think it was purely out of house spite.

Meanwhile, the dog — who always thought of us as role models prior to her finding us with our heads in the dishwasher — had figured out that the only possible objective of a hardwood floor was to make one fall down on it. So she now is firmly implanted on the area rugs scattered about and will only move from to place to place by flitting from one carpet to another like a flea on an elephant. Again, I blame it on the house.

Our house has decided that it would select which nook and which cranny in which we might get cellphone service. Any place that could be remotely viewed as comfortable was out. And, I must tell you, it gets a little old doing business while sitting in the fireplace. Especially on cold nights.

Recently the upstairs toilet flushed itself and overflowed, sending water cascading into our living room like a tsunami. It was good. It got our minds off the leaking roof for a couple of hours and Rosie the dog liked it because she could finally get a grip on the hardwood floors.

And then along came a friend who was looking to downsize. We introduced him to the house, and the house immediately liked him better than it's ever liked us. We're not anxious to sell, and we were honest about the foibles of our little domain. But we are providing incentives.